


Sea of Trees

by Pixeled



Category: Compilation of Final Fantasy VII
Genre: Dysfunctional Family, F/M, Hardships of Love, M/M, Torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-14
Updated: 2020-05-14
Packaged: 2021-03-03 05:07:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,086
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24189379
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Pixeled/pseuds/Pixeled
Summary: And once the storm is over you won't remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won't even be sure, in fact, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm you won't be the same person who walked in. That's what this storm's all about.
Relationships: Lucrecia Crescent/Vincent Valentine, Vincent Valentine/Veld
Comments: 2
Kudos: 13





	Sea of Trees

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami and “Broken Sleep” by Agnes Obel

“Sometimes fate is like a small sandstorm that keeps changing directions. You change direction but the sandstorm chases you. You turn again, but the storm adjusts. Over and over you play this out, like some ominous dance with death just before dawn. Why? Because this storm isn't something that blew in from far away, something that has nothing to do with you. This storm is you. Something inside of you. So all you can do is give in to it, step right inside the storm, closing your eyes and plugging up your ears so the sand doesn't get in, and walk through it, step by step. There's no sun there, no moon, no direction, no sense of time. Just fine white sand swirling up into the sky like pulverized bones. That's the kind of sandstorm you need to imagine.

“And you really will have to make it through that violent, metaphysical, symbolic storm. No matter how metaphysical or symbolic it might be, make no mistake about it: it will cut through flesh like a thousand razor blades. People will bleed there, and you will bleed too. Hot, red blood. You'll catch that blood in your hands, your own blood and the blood of others.

“And once the storm is over you won't remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won't even be sure, in fact, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm you won't be the same person who walked in. That's what this storm's all about.” 

Haruki Murakami, _Kafka on the Shore_

Had he dozed off? It’d been so long since he simply fell asleep like that. His heart was racing. Lips, poised to tell him to go on an assignment that would take him into the mountains, an assignment he would never return from alive. How he’d felt hurt. It would be at least a year. He would miss him. He would mourn their fragile relationship. He would never see him again. It ended up being thirty-one years. One which he was alive for, the end of which was spent in the torturous grasp of hell, the other thirty spent in a coffin like trash forgotten in the basement when Hojo was bored of him. He was a lab rat who no longer served its purpose. Those thirty years were preferable to the months of tearing, and sawing, and hunger, and pain, and wishing, and sobbing—of being forced to slowly lose his humanity. When he gave up, things were so much easier. He could sleep. He could dream. He could fix things, if only in his mind. He could make people understand. He could tell Lucrecia to leave and she would follow. They’d live a modest life in a farm in the middle of nowhere and ShinRa would never find them. Their son would have ebony hair and bright red eyes, his mother’s penchant for wrinkling her brow when she thought about something, his mother’s perfect bow lips, her laugh. He prayed their son wouldn’t be like him, that he’d be a scientist like his mother. He prayed that he would grow up to do the planet good.

The nightmares came in waves. His broken sleep left him exhausted and tearful. He saw his mother lying dead in her casket, flowers laid at her feet. He remembered the rage he had always felt and constantly had to restrain until he couldn’t any longer. He felt the spatter of blood hitting his face as he hit his classmate over and over until his skull caved in. He shouldn’t have made fun of him. It was the last insult he would tolerate. All those years that he got into fights at school culminated in this violence.

He remembered his father walking away from him, the ShinRa troopers clasping his hands tightly in handcuffs that cut off his circulation. He never saw his father again. In that moment he remembered him helping him to level a rifle to kill a deer, touching him for the first time since his mother died. He remembered his father pointing out all the names of the constellations. Two moments—that’s all he had. His father looked at him and saw his mother. He locked himself in his study, surrounded by scientific tomes, dealt with things that made sense to him, that didn’t remind him of her. He raised himself. His father never looked at him after that, and when he walked out of his life, Veld was there to replace him.

He’d spent so much time with Veld. Veld saw something in him that no one had ever seen, and he carefully bred him to be so much more. Suddenly he wasn’t a delinquent, a disgrace, someone who no one even wanted to look at. 

He had a natural affinity for guns. He was good at shooting, and he killed with relish and sometimes savagely. When blood spattered his face he laughed and felt giddy. He was no longer ashamed of who he was. Suddenly all his anger was channeled into what he did, and he wanted to make Veld proud. 

When he kissed Veld for the first time everything seemed to click into place. Veld kissed him back! For the first time in his life he felt content, happy even. Someone _wanted_ him. Then Veld told him it couldn’t happen again. But of course it happened again. And again. He was a storm that couldn’t be tamed, and yet Veld knew just how to. He fell in love hard and fast, and like with all first loves, he felt totally consumed as if wading into the water and going underneath, holding his breath until he thought he might drown before popping back up again. And maybe Veld didn’t feel the same way, but he never told him out of fear, never asked. Pulling a trigger, ending someone’s life, that was easy. It was often messy, but never as messy as his feelings. 

Years went by. He always found his way back into Veld’s bed. He always allowed himself to be vulnerable, but never too vulnerable. 

Then Veld told him they needed to talk. 

He was going to Nibelheim. Just like that, he was supposed to walk out of Veld’s shadow.

When he left, he regretted never telling him how he felt, but that anger he felt as a child? It surged back up like a flood inside him. He was angry at Veld, angry that he was going to be a glorified bodyguard. He lay in bed the night before he was to leave. He rarely slept apart from Veld, but he was so very angry. Veld knocked in the middle of the night. He never knocked. He shouted so loud, so powerfully, that Veld turned around and left. 

He stalked out after him. He remembered finally admitting it, even though it was all one hot red blur. He felt like he was drowning again, only this time when he held his breath, he sucked in the water, closed his eyes, and accepted his fate. 

He didn’t remember what Veld said, and now he never would. 

The trees were so thick in Nibelheim, the mountains so high. It was like a sea of trees, dragging you down into the earth like quicksand. In his free time he would run through them, pretend he was free. That quicksand was always there, was always going to swallow him whole. Or perhaps it was a sandstorm he dragged his feet through, never going anywhere? 

When he first met Lucrecia, he got lost in her eyes. 

She said she loved him first. But it was a secret. He’d creep into her room at night, twine his fingers with hers. When they made love, it felt so powerful he almost didn’t know how to feel. It was certainly love. But it was bigger than that. He felt the machinations of fate. 

When Lucrecia married Hojo, she revealed that she was pregnant with Hojo’s child. Again that anger he felt came surging up like bile in the back of his throat. It was not his place to say anything, and he had to pretend he had no feelings, that he was simply a bodyguard, a ruthless killing machine. But he knew that had to have been his child. 

Experimenting on that unborn child went against his every wish and desire. He forgot himself, spoke up out of turn. Lucrecia was so cold and her eyes so different. He stopped creeping into her room. His love, once so absolute, turned into something else. Resentment? Jealousy? Once again he was not allowed to have feelings. 

But he couldn’t turn his feelings off so quickly. Her pregnancy wore on her. He carried her to her room on several occasions after she passed out muttering about a calamity from the skies. Her eyes, glassy and unfocused, scared him to his core. He was so afraid she would miscarry because of the experiments. Hojo was never around to take care of her. That was left up to him. Hojo toiled from daybreak to well after midnight, muttering to himself and writing furiously like a man possessed. He only came to collect Lucrecia when it was time for the injections. She relied heavily on him to walk toward the room they’d set up as a study. 

“This is wrong! Look what it’s doing to her!” Him, speaking out of turn again, vehement.

“Don’t poke your nose into things you couldn’t possibly even begin to understand, you moronic boy. Run along now, ShinRa lapdog.”

Flashes painted the backs of Vincent’s eyeballs with Hojo’s brain matter splattering all over the wall. Instead, he balled his hands into fists and collected a bunch of cans, stalking out into a winter storm in just his suit, shooting them one by one on a log. When that wasn’t enough he unloaded a whole clip, slapped a new one in, and shot until the cans all clattered off the log, several holes throughout them. He was panting, feral. He didn’t even feel the cold because his blood was so hot in his veins. 

After a while he calmed down and looked up at the colorless sky, at the fat fluffy snowflakes that fell to the ground. As he stood there the wind picked up and the snow became a squall. 

It was almost tranquil. He realized he was shivering when Lucrecia walked out in her winter jacket, his peacoat folded over her arm. 

“You’ll catch a cold,” Lucrecia said softly. She extended the coat to him and he shrugged it on, turning the lapels up. 

“You look like a detective,” Lucrecia smiled. “My detective.”

“I’m not yours,” he snapped. He didn’t mean to.

“Vincent…we need to talk.”

Nothing good ever came of that proclamation. He didn’t answer, only looked at her expectantly.

“He’s yours,” she said softly. “Our baby.”

“He?” 

“It came to me. In a vision. He will be very important, Vincent. I know you don’t agree with what Hojo and I are doing, but….imagine! A living breathing Cetra!”

“Whatever you say,” he said, looking away from her.

“Oh, Vincent. I never could have married you. You understand, right? It’s much easier for Hojo to believe Sephiroth is his.”

“Sephiroth?” Vincent asked, remarkably calm even though his heart was thundering in his chest. 

“The tree of life! Imagine! He will lead us all to the Promised Land. You were a part of that, Vincent. But no one must know. Okay?”

He walked back into the mansion on legs that felt hollow. He himself felt hollow, alone, and trapped. 

He died soon after that.

He didn’t want to think about Lucrecia anymore. He didn’t want to think of Veld. But they were the only two people he loved, and they had both kept him a secret. He was a disgrace once more. He couldn’t bare the look Veld had given him before he left to Nibelheim. Nor could he bare Lucrecia’s pleas for him to wake up, to live again. He knew she imbued him with Chaos to save him. And in the end he forgave her, as he did Veld. 

He promised himself he would never love again. But then, one night, while he was flipping through a dossier Reeve gave him, he heard an unmistakable voice. He ran, throwing open the doors of the WRO headquarters conference room and there he was, chatting with Reeve casually. Veld. 


End file.
